Lin at the Cinema - August 2026
Lately I’ve been wanting to find an avenue to talk about one of the most important aspects of my artistic diet, my regular trips to the cinema. With the exception of a couple years here and there with extenuating circumstances, it’s been a ritual for me to see something new in cinemas each weekend. In the past I’ve tried my hand at the good ol’ YouTube review, but I find it’s difficult to keep up on that when working full time. Seeing the movies takes time, gathering my thoughts takes time, recording myself talking about them takes time, and editing the videos takes time. I think I make my points more succinctly in written form, and since the sublimation of image into music is an integral part of my creative process, I feel there’s a place for it on this blog. So, with that, let’s talk about the new films I saw in August!
The Odyssey
I know this was released mid-July, but I happened to be in Spain for the València International Performing Arts Festival (more on that another day), so I didn’t get a chance to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey until the first of August. Quite frankly, I was dreading this experience.
I, like many young cinephiles, was dazzled by Nolan’s films when I first encountered them. Memento and Inception, despite falling out of my all-time favorites as the years go on, are still fantastic films, but I’ve found his recent output… not to my tastes, to the point that I didn’t see his last two films. As a lover of Greek Mythology, though, I figured if there was any story to get my ass into the theater to see a 3-hour Nolan joint, this would be it.
There are spectacular sequences in The Odyssey. The Circe segment, the Laestrygonians, the Underworld - these are the highlights of the film for me. This is not most of the film, and ultimately I found the experience quite disappointing. The editing is too choppy to really feel the passage of time as intended. There is a distinct lack of breathtaking images. The score feels like a scam; supposedly Nolan instructed composer Ludwig Göransson to use only period-accurate instruments, but the score is littered with synth drones and clear electronically produced sounds. There’s also not a single memorable theme to be found. I was absolutely yearning for the days of blockbusters with grand orchestral scores, replete with leitmotifs (I was yearning for Lord of the Rings).
Most alienating for me was the simple modernized dialogue and performances. This is a poetry-less adaptation of the most famous poem in human history.
I’m very aware I am in the minority on this one. I’m glad to see any film getting people to go to the cinema, so its success pleases me. It’s simply not the adaptation of this story I crave, and what I want out of a film, this ultimately didn’t deliver. I found it a bland and uninvolving experience, and I felt like it would be 20 years before I saw home again.
5/10
I Want Your Sex
Olivia Wilde is having a damn good year, with this outrageous sex comedy immediately following her directorial return to form The Invite, which I also very much enjoyed. This makes for an interesting parallel with that film; The Invite is a boomer-friendly introduction to the concept of non-monogamous sex that I can imagine feels scandalous and edgy to older or, for lack of a better word, more prudish audience members. It’s a film I’d recommend to virtually everyone in my life. I Want Your Sex is decidedly more adventurous in its presentation of unconventional sex.
This was actually my first experience with a film by provocative queer cinema pioneer Gregg Araki, despite many of his films being on my radar for quite some time. There’s just so much to watch. I Want Your Sex isn’t the most polished film I’ve seen this year, and there are is one particular character and performance I outright hated. Despite that, I found this film genuinely bold, confrontational, and thought-provoking in its examination of BDSM, age-gaps, sexual power dynamics, etc. It’s a film the kind of media-illiterate person who is only capable of thinking of art in terms of whether or not it conforms to their personal view of morality might find reprehensible. Its characters are messy, at times immoral, perhaps even unforgivably so. But crucially, they are human.
I love films like this that remind us that people rarely behave how we expect them to, or feel they should. And the central performances from Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman (in the kind of egoless, boundary-pushing performance his late father would absolutely have approved of) keep these characters watchable even through their worst, most alienating moments. It’s a very funny film, and even though it’s nothing near the most transgressive thing I’ve ever seen, it’s a bold statement in 2026 and one of my favorites of the year.
8/10
The End of Oak Street
David Robert Mitchell has had an interesting career. I haven’t caught up with his first feature The Myth of the American Sleepover, I quite liked his sophomore effort It Follows (certainly his most successful endeavor thus far), and I quite disliked his third film Under the Silver Lake. He isn’t a filmmaker locked into one genre, even within the same film, and I’m always interested to see what he’ll do next.
The End of Oak Street is essentially an homage to Spielberg in the 80s and 90s, albeit with a meaner streak. This tale of a suburban neighborhood - white picket fences, neighborhood barbecues, kids on bikes and all - plucked out of time and dropped in a prehistoric jungle, is an absolute riot. Mitchell takes full advantage of the wealth of ridiculous imagery promised by this premise. The asshole next-door neighbor on the roof shoots his gun at circling pterodactyls, before meeting a grisly end. The nice old lady down the street becomes dinner for a pack of coelophyses. A shiver-inducing titanoboa slithers its way from the upstairs bedroom window down the stairs to the kitchen, with length to spare. The allosaurus chase and spinosaurus attack are particular highlights for me.
This is not a masterpiece. Its characters and dialogue kind of suck, the first act is paced quite poorly, and the ending is an annoying cop-out that always makes my eyes roll. But once things get started, it is an absolute blast and so refreshing to see a solid dinosaur action movie after a slate of terrible Jurassic World films. This film is proving quite divisive and a box office disappointment, and I think that’s a shame. The world needs more original, unserious fun like this, and it’s exactly what I want out of popcorn entertainment.
7/10
Rose of Nevada
This is the third feature from Mark Jenkin, whose debut Bait I haven’t yet seen but have been looking forward to getting around to one of these days. I found his second feature Enys Men a stylistically interesting bore with very little to offer beyond a palpable British folk horror-esque atmosphere. Not enough to sustain a feature length film for me.
Rose of Nevada I found a thorough improvement. This is very much still a vibes-first kind of movie, but there is enough of a narrative to piece together that it stays engaging. This is a slow, hypnotic film. I found myself entranced by the briny imagery, the immaculate sound design, and surprisingly, the repetitious yet meditative work on the fishing boat these characters spend the majority of the runtime doing. In terms of vibe, this is honestly the closest I’ve felt to the experience of The Lighthouse, which would easily make my top 3 films of the last 10 years.
Rose of Nevada isn’t a horror film, but at times it almost feels like one. Atmosphere is Jenkin’s strong suit, and in this case I was really on his wavelength. I also feel like there would be a lot to uncover thematically on a second watch and I’m keen to revisit it someday. Certainly won’t be for everyone, but I surrendered to its spell and found it quite a rewarding experience.
8/10
The Wrong Girls
Honestly, I don’t have a lot to say about this stoner comedy starring Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat, mostly because it wears itself proudly on its sleeve. This is a gleefully wacky film involving telepathy-inducing hallucinogens derived from squid sperm, and its humor is about as hit-or-miss as that description might suggest. There are some pretty hilarious scenarios set up in this movie, with an early set-piece at a fancy Harvard party (incidentally, I’m almost certain the same exact mansion from I Want Your Sex was used as the filming location here) easily being the funniest section of the film for me.
It overstays its welcome a bit, and some of the gonzo humor didn’t tickle my funny bone. However, Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat are a delight throughout. Their relationship is the heart of the movie, and while it follows the standard trajectory for these kinds of films, their chemistry carries the viewer through when the plot starts to lose you. Kate McKinnon also has a small yet hilarious role, and LaKeith Stanfield is another welcome addition to the cast.
I probably wouldn’t watch this again (unless I was on hallucinogens), but it was a perfectly fine one-time watch, even if I won’t remember it come next year.
5/10
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Some pretty attention-grabbing titles this month! This third feature from Jane Schoenbrun was one of the films I was looking forward to the most this year. I absolutely fuck with their style, and their 2024 film I Saw the TV Glow is probably the most accurate and emotionally affecting film about trans identity I’ve ever seen.
A consistent theme throughout all of Jane’s films is how the media we consume in our formative years shapes who we are. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair explored internet culture, ARGs, and the line between role-play and identity. I Saw the TV Glow used a stand-in for Buffy the Vampire Slayer to express the parasocial attachments we form to fictional characters, and again, the blurry line between the self and characters we identify with.
Camp Miasma is Jane’s most technically accomplished work yet, once again blurring fiction and reality into a psycho-sexual romp fueled by the slashers of the 80s. It’s very difficult to describe the experience of a Jane Schoenbrun film; you kind of either feel it or you don’t. I feel it deeply. The entire film, I was just there. Completely sucked into the world they create, falling in love with the characters brilliantly performed by Hannah Einbinder and a scenery-devouring Gillian Anderson.
Horror films mean so much to queer people like me. Jane understands this, and clearly the genre means so much to them too. Their past two films felt more like films about horror than actual horror films in and of themselves. Camp Miasma is both academic deconstruction and full indulgence of the genre. If you came to see a thought-provoking meditation on sex and death, you absolutely get that. But if you just came to see the sex and death, you absolutely get that too. As Gillian Anderson’s character says so succinctly at one point, “these movies are about two things: flesh and fluids.”
9/10
Buffet Infinity
Liminal horror is in full swing. It’s the defining movement of the genre in the mid-2020s, and this year in particular it’s really exploded with films like Backrooms, Exit 8, and even to some degree Obsession. Enter Shudder original Buffet Infinity, a gonzo tale of cosmic horror told entirely through channel surfing local commercials.
I absolutely love the style of this film. Its first 45 minutes or so are frankly analog horror-comedy perfection as local commercials reminiscent of those created by Cramblin-Duvet in the brilliant comedy serious Detroiters are intruded upon by a mysterious new restaurant in the area - Buffet Infinity. It slowly becomes clear something isn’t right with Buffet Infinity. There’s a distinct lack of humanity that really unsettles even through its goofiness.
Ultimately, the film can’t really sustain its unease and by the end it devolves into utter schlock. Still, the journey is worth the destination if you, like me, have loving nostalgia for bizarre Adult Swim shorts, lost media, and early analog horror.
6/10
It Ends
It feels like this one’s been on my radar for at least a year. After finding success on-demand, Alexander Ullom’s debut feature was picked up by Neon for a theatrical release this year, and I decided to wait until I could experience it in theaters. Boy am I glad I did. This is something special.
Again an example of the liminal horror trend pioneered by young filmmakers coming onto the scene (Ullom is 28), the four college graduates making up the cast find themselves trapped on a never-ending stretch of forest road. That is all I will say. I avoided trailers and went in only knowing the basic premise, and I think that’s the way to experience it.
The outright horror is front-loaded, and what this film becomes afterwards is far more existential and to my surprise, genuinely profound. Though a very different film, in ways I was reminded of the experience of my absolute favorite of the year so far, Sirāt. Both are road journeys that turn inward, becoming journeys of the soul. It Ends beautifully expresses what it’s like to try to find your way in a world very different to the one you expected when you were a child. In a post-Covid, post-Trump existence, the fundamental cruelty of the world is laid bare before our eyes: you are not guaranteed a living wage, no matter how hard you work. A college degree is no longer a promise of a stable future. The systems we expected to keep us safe are actually fragile, unreliable. All of this is in the DNA of It Ends, even though it’s unsaid. It’s a film about four people on an endless road, but it’s really about so much more than that.
Where do we look for meaning in such an uncaring world?
9/10
Insidious: Out of the Further
Honestly I’ve never been a big fan of any of the Insidious movies. The first is probably the closest to good in the franchise, with a very creepy and effective first 2/3 before it plunges headfirst into silliness. The following two films were even sillier, but watchable to a degree. The Last Key and The Red Door were excruciatingly boring, terrible excuses for horror films.
However, there’s something to a sixth installment in a horror franchise that intrigues me. Saw, Final Destination, Friday the 13th, to name just a few, have a suprising bounce in quality in their sixth installments. It tends to be a point of reinvention after the staleness of recycled plots and scares becomes too much and the public loses interest. So, I thought “what the hell, let’s see what possible excuse they can have to continue making these movies.” And while Out of the Further is neither scary nor particularly well made, it is amusingly preposterous.
I was pretty bored and annoyed during the setup of this one, but after a fairly well-executed sequence in which the protagonist basically finds herself in the backrooms, I perked up. By the end I was in utter disbelief at some of the narrative choices and scares. I have to respect the film for taking its hook further than I expected. The climax is absolutely hilarious and left me feeling genuinely happy I gave it a chance.
I can’t call it a good movie, I’m not even sure I can call it a good horror movie, but it is certainly more entertaining than the unwatchable slogs that precede it.
6/10
Buddy
It’s funny I brought up Adult Swim in reference to Buffet Infinity, because Buddy is the feature debut from the creator of one of its crowning achievements - Too Many Cooks.
Casper Kelly’s work truly does unsettle me. Too Many Cooks is rad, and his segment in last year’s V/H/S/HALLOWEEN was the chaotic highlight of the film for me, its awkward, unpolished filmmaking actually adding to the surreal horror of its ghoulish premise.
With Buddy, Kelly goes full analog horror. The film presents itself as a lost 90s children’s show, clearly inspired by Barney, centered around an orange unicorn with a blond comb-over, the titular Buddy, voiced by Keegan Michael Key. All seems well at first, until one of the child stars opts not to participate in a dance party episode. Buddy doesn’t like being disobeyed. Next episode, there’s a new child star in his place, and some of the kids start to suspect there’s a darkness underneath Buddy’s friendly visage. This is a horror film, so obviously they’re right.
Buddy has absolutely spectacular production design. Instantly, this feels like a show from your own childhood. The bright colors, matte backgrounds, talking mailbox and train (the train, incidentally, voiced by Michael Shannon of all people). Keegan Michael Key also adds so much life to the character of Buddy, and the physical performance from Sergey Zhuravsky is also noteworthy. Something about the way he timidly holds his hooves in front of his stomach when he’s trying to hold his temper really tickled me. Props also must be given to the child actors, who all really did a great job.
As much as I loved the presentation of the film, it wasn’t as effective a horror film for me as Kelly’s shorter work. There is an immersion-breaking point about a third of the way in, and even though it does ultimately come together well by the end, it’s hard to ignore how much the shift breaks the flow of the film. I also think it would have been well served by spending more time as a “normal” kids show before the darkness starts to reveal itself.
Still, Buddy is a delightfully unique film, and the dual spectres of Trump and real-life monsters on the sets of children’s TV shows that clearly influenced the title character add a specific uneasiness that make this a truly sickening horror film.
7/10
The Samurai and the Prisoner
And finally for a change of pace, let’s talk prolific Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa's (no relation to Akira) newest film, The Samurai and the Prisoner. This is a historical mystery-drama that explores some interesting ideas about honor within the context of samurai morality. The film centers around real-life Lord Murashige, who is in rebellion against the warlord Oda. He’s losing. Badly. When Kanbei arrives to inform him his castle is about to be taken over, Murashige decides to imprison him rather than beheading him as samurai custom would demand. This is a terrible outcome for Kanbei - if he or his head does not return to Oda, he will be presumed to have defected and his son will die in retaliation. But Murashige has a strong aversion to bloodshed. Again, a problem when you’re a samurai lord.
This is a very intriguing setup to what is unfortunately an endless slog of a 2 and a half hour movie. Rather than a morality play, the film plays out as four repetitive murder mysteries, each corresponding to the season in which it takes place. The structure is the film’s downfall. Every time a title card arrives to let us know which season we’re in, it feels like the film goes back to square one. What makes things even more frustrating is that in each section, the same checklist is followed in the same order. Someone is murdered, Murashige tries to solve it, he can’t, he asks Kanbei for help, rinse and repeat.
The filmmaking also isn’t polished enough to make up for the unengaging story. Numerous attempted smooth tracking shots are marred by hiccups, as if the camera rig rolls over a rock, and all I could think was “why didn’t they give that another go?” The lighting in all the nighttime scenes is frankly horrendous. There is an unnatural level of overlighting which sticks out like a sore thumb in a period piece. That said, the film is shot in beautiful locations so there is no shortage of elegant Japanese architecture and its serene incorporation of water, rock, and vegetation to feast your eyes upon. Again, it’s just not enough to make up for a story that repeatedly pushed me away when it threatened to get interesting. Sadly, a disappointment.